Post tagged: idea

Desktop Environments 2023

Around April 2023, I decided to look for a new Linux Desktop Environment for my personal void linux. So I tried these distros: lxqt: This is the one I eventually chose to switch to. I liked it that it was very small and light, and very modular, almost like a kit that you assemble yourself. Because I have thinking for some time that I would like to make my ...

nas ops cmd

This is my op script. This is stupidly simple script to elevate priviledges in order to manage NFS shares on my QNAP NAS. The idea is that NFS shares do squash-root so admin access is disallowed through NFS. This gives a convenient way to issue root level commands without using NFS but instead use ssh ...

Encrypting FileSystem in Void Linux

The point of this recipe is to create a encrypted file sytem so that when the disc is disposed, it does not need to be securely erased. This is particularly important for SSD devices since because of block remapping (for wear levelling) data can't be overwritten consistently. The idea is that the boot/root filesystem containing the encryption ...

manage busyness

Former United States President Dwight Eisenhower was responsible for putting together one of the most important yet fundamentally simple to understand concepts in time management. Eisenhower's Urgent/Important Principle is a tool to help decipher what tasks need to be addressed more immediately than others. Anyone who uses the principle will be better able to organize and orchestrate their ...

Writing Safe Shell scripts

Writing shell scripts leaves a lot of room to make mistakes, in ways that will cause your scripts to break on certain input, or (if some input is untrusted) open up security vulnerabilities. Here are some tips on how to make your shell scripts safer. Don't The simplest step is to avoid using shell at all. Many higher-level languages are both easier to write the code in in the first place, and avoid some of the issues that shell ...

RPMGOT

Software package download proxy rpmgot is a simple/lightweight software package download proxy. It was designed to run on an OpenWRT router with some USB storage. So it is fully implemented as an ash script. The basic idea has been implemented multiple times. For example refer to this article on a squid based implementation. Unlike squid, which once you include all its dependencies can use up over 1MB of space just to install it, this software has very few dependencies. The idea is for small developers running the same operating system version(s) would benefit from a local mirror of them, but they don't have so many systems that it's actually reasonable for them to run a full mirror, which would entail rsyncing a bunch of content daily, much of which may be packages would never be used. rpmgot implements a lazy mirror something that would appear to its client systems as a full mirror, but would act more as a proxy. When a client installed a particular version of a particular package for the first time, it would go fetch them from a "real" mirror, and then cache it for a long time. Subsequent requests for the same package from the "mirror" would be served from cache. ...

Resizing a Linux RAID

It is possible to migrate the whole array to larger drives (e.g. 250 GB to 1 TB) by replacing one by one. In the end the number of devices will be the same, the data will remain intact, and you will have more space available to you. Extending an existing RAID array In order to increase the usable size of the array, you must increase ...

Using a NAS200 as a Print server

Last weekend I had a small weekend project to move my All-In-One Printer/Scanner from my Xen host server to a spare NAS200 I had lying around. Since the NAS200 has a i486 compatible CPU, and I had been able to run a CentOS 5 distro before, I figure it would make a good server with low power consumption. For that I updated my NASCC firmware so that it would boot a USB key, and update my CentOS image creation script. This worked well, I was able to boot CentOS without that much effort altogether. I myself have an Epson Stylus CX5500 which unfortunately only comes with binary drivers. This was not much of a problem since the NAS200 has a i486 compatible CPU. I find this is relatively unique among different NAS models. Alas, the performance was quite disappointing. I should be used to the NAS200 underperforming. But really, this was truly sad. I did not bother to test the printing, but I did try scanning with it. Running scanimage to scan a single page was taking over 15 minutes before I hit Ctrl+C. It was an idea, but the results were so sub par. The only take-aways of this are: ...

atratus project

The other day I came across this project. Looks an interesting idea. It is a project that lets you run unmodified Linux binaries on Windows. It is more similar to WINE than to for example coLinux. While I conceptually I understand how it would work at a low level, I am curious how it works with dynamically link executables. This is something I would like to test out when I have time. ...